I suppose every time someone 'writes a paper' on something you take it as bragging -- however this is called a statement of fact.
Bragging sounds more like "I was the only scientist capable of discovering the phenomenon and writing a paper on it".
Or "I wrote the seminal, ground-breaking paper on..." (unless this is a well-established public fact -- but even then, one should probably not mention it in this way).
We also have something called 'references'. Therefore, when someone writes "In my paper published in Nature, Issue 12, Volume 192...." it is not a "hint", it is a reference. A competent academic would then look up the issue (and unless the author wrote two papers in the journal, you should not need any extra information).
Perhaps "2-3 years ago" was too vague -- although given the scarcity of papers I have published at that particular conference, it is not hard to find the correct "year": 2008.
Of course, the inability to make the basic Google search to discover the paper even after I referenced it, explains the inability to have read the paper before hand (hint: regular scientists will often look up papers published on the topic they're about to embark on), or to have written the code without duplicating the same security issue. If you can't read, it's hard to write.
--
Best regards,